3:39pm: The league confirmed in a press release that it’s eliminating the G League Ignite at the conclusion of the season, which is March 28.
3:16pm: The NBA plans to shut down the G League Ignite — a team for developmental prospects that was launched in 2020 — after the 2023/24 season concludes, sources tell Shams Charania of The Athletic.
The news isn’t surprising. Commissioner Adam Silver said the NBA was “in the process of reassessing” the viability of the Ignite at All-Star Weekend last month.
“I’m not sure what the future of Team Ignite will be because before I felt there was a hole in the marketplace we were filling,” Silver said. “Now my focus is turning to earlier development of those players.”
As Charania writes, the program was created as an alternative to college for top pre-draft-eligible prospects at a time when college players were not allowed to be compensated. However, changes to the way the NCAA operates — most notably the name, image and likeness (NIL) policy and the transfer portal — have made the Ignite more or less redundant.
According to John Hollinger of The Athletic (Twitter link), several NBA teams had questions about why the league was spending money on the Ignite, as well as the end goal for the program.
The Ignite produced four top-10 picks — Jalen Green, Jonathan Kuminga, Dyson Daniels and Scoot Henderson — and had 10 players drafted over the past three seasons. A pair of current Ignite players, Ron Holland and Matas Buzelis, are projected lottery picks in the upcoming draft, according to ESPN’s big board.
After going just 11-21 last regular season, the Ignite are the worst team in the NBAGL in ’23/24, with a 2-28 regular-season record.
boo
NIL claims another victim
lmao “victim.” They were @ss.
I get what the posters gearing towards, college sports are no longer what they were to past generations –
They are essentially glorified AaU teams today; no sweat to the young’ ns , a AaU format is all American kids know anyway
The lifelong college fans take the hit
Most of the people that prefer college over nba. Hate this even more than us Nba folk
Has nothing to do with NIL …. G-League Ignite is ending because we don’t have enough young talent good enough to compete at the G-League level. These guys got their brains beat in all year long. Ron Holland and Matas have previously been touted as the top pick. They got destroyed. The classes coming behind these guys are not any better. No reason to have them play and get destroyed. The talent gets a little bit worse every single year now.
Reed Shepherd and Rob Dillingham, touted as locks to be top 5 NBA Draft picks …. Just got bounced by Oakland …. Oakland!! This is the future of the NBA??? This is what a year of “tutelage” under Calipari right now. You get paid. You don’t really win.
If they don’t want to go college, and want to get paid for a year, what are the rules of playing over in Europe for a year before going into the draft? Or like Lamelo when he went AUS. Are there some kind of restrictions stopping them?
Nope, just guys not wanting to go overseas I guess
Young players need to learn to play a team game before thinking about personal stats.
The Kentucky team that lost tonight to Oakland was essentially the same thing as the G League Ignite. A bunch of five stars who don’t care about team ball or winning in March. Just want to go pro ASAP and use college ball to improve their draft stock/overseas prospects.
That Kentucky team is not like the past. I don’t think they had 5 star recruits or they were barely 5 star.
Never heard of Shepperd like Fox, Murray, Wall, SGA when they played. The big guy wasn’t top guy like Kat, Cousins, or AD. I don’t think they had a wing highly rated.
The whole G League is wasted potential
What would you prefer they do with these kids who otherwise would have no opportunity to develop or continue playing in the states?
Eliminate Silver too please
No surprise here. Ignite was an abject failure. Didn’t develop kids to NBA standards much, if at all. We’ll see what happens with the Thompsons and Scoot but they look kinda bad for top ten picks.
The Thompson Twins didn’t go to the Ignite. They were OTE
Kudos to the NBA. For once, they’ve cancelled one of Silver’s experiments because it didn’t work (they almost never consider that a reason to do much of anything).
At some point, the NBA is going to have to learn how to develop young players, whether that’s when they leave High School or after their NIL money runs out with their eligibility. High School development ended ages ago, in favor of AAU non-development. Now, College development is all but done due to NIL. But this Ignite thing obviously wasn’t the answer (NIL or no NIL). Good riddance.
I don’t get how people think this wasn’t a good thing…previous years teams were pretty stacked, and it gave a good opportunity to see these guys in nba situations. I was a fan of it, especially b/c I don’t like college basketball, and most of my scouting stuff isn’t watching actual games anymore, whereas I can easily watch g-league games for evaluation
That was also an easy way to scoot players instead of Moving all around the country